On this day in 2004 David Wheeler, British computer scientist and inventor of the subroutine passed away. Wheeler was born in Birmingham on February 9, 1927 and earned his BA at the University of Cambridge, where he also completed the world’s first PhD in computer science in 1951. He worked on the original Cambridge electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC), and alongside Maurice Wilkes and Stanley Gill invented the closed subroutine. He is responsible for many other contributions in cryptography and computer testing, including designing the WAKE, TEA and XTEA encryption algorithms; the Burrows-Wheeler transform; the Cambridge Ring; and architectural contributions to the ILLIAC system.
Wheeler became a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge in 1964 and in 1994 was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. That same year he officially retired, though he continued to be an active member of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory up until his death a decade later. In 2003 he was named a Computer History Museum Fellow Award recipient for his many achievements and contributions. The Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge continues to hold the “Wheeler Lecture”, an annual series of distinguished lectures named after him.
David Wheeler – Image taken from University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology